Fantastic Company, Somewhat Iffy Technology
Pros
From a corporate standpoint, the company is fantastic. As my first job out of college, I couldn’t have asked for a better environment. - The pay is great - Management and HR are very nice and focused on helping employees succeed - Management focuses on people over numbers. It’s okay if features don’t get shipped quite as fast as planned because employees are people, not machines - The company is willing to invest fiscally in employee retention. They budget for a wide array of things - department lunches, a company picnic, holidays gifts, training, flu shots, etc
Cons
The company is growing, but going through some growing pains, as most do. Most of my complaints amount to things that work well when the number of developers is small, but don’t scale well. To summarize my biggest complaints: - Ask the company how they run things, and they would say “agile”, but it is actually iterative waterfall with a daily meeting. - Ticket grooming can be hit or miss, and sometimes more time is spent triaging and implementing bug tickets QA sends back during regression testing than was spent actually implementing a feature. - There is nearly zero automated testing, and as a result sometimes major features break in deployed environments, and sometimes small to medium bugs are not caught for several weeks. - Requirements both large and small occasionally change after tickets have been assigned (or sometimes completed). - Developers are sometimes told to make a feature before the Jira ticket is created, leaving us to guess on the details. However, I am aware that some of these things are actively being worked on, so take this list with several grains of salt